“Well,” she says. “That’s good.”

“Do you really, Elizabeth?”

“No. Kind of. Not about being together. About how we hurt people, though. How I hurt them.” She picks up the tiny spoon from a tiny jar of chili sauce, twirls it in front of her face, and smiles. “Did I ever tell you about how I used to spend my Saturday nights when I first moved to New York?”

“Maybe?”

“Bed, Bath and Beyond.”

“No. This is new.”

“I used to take the train down to Bed, Bath and Beyond and just look.”

“For bedding?”

“No, Robert. At people.”

I laugh.

“I’d go there to look at people.”

“Oh. You’re serious.”

“Yeah, I’m serious. I’d go down there to watch grown men buying colanders. Women shopping for vacuum filters. HEPA filters for thousand-dollar vacuum cleaners. Can you imagine? I mean, I’m still not sure what to do with a vacuum filter—and not because I’m spoiled. Yeah, I know we have a cleaning lady, I know that, but it’s not like we’d be living in squalor without one. It’s not like I’d have us shuffling around on dirty floors. It’s just that I grew up with mops and brooms. Didn’t you?”

“Sure,” I allow. “But we also had a vacuum. I’m certain your family did too, Lizzie.”

“Fine. But it wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t Our Man in Havana, okay? Maybe we had a plain old vacuum, but it would have been a DustBuster. A Dirt Devil. I mean, you know my parents.”

“I do.”

“They aren’t exactly the Dyson type. The Miele type.” She mouths the word Miele—meel-eh—to herself. “They’d never go out and buy a bread maker, right? A salad spinner? They’re more into microwave dinners.”

I smile. She said it, not me. “That sounds accurate.”

“Not that I’m complaining. I mean, no one bakes a meaner Stouffer’s French bread pizza than my mom. All I know is that twenty years ago, there were a whole lot of clean floors in Manhattan. There were a whole lot of couples eating off placemats.”

“You watched people shop.”

“Sometimes I’d push a cart around and fill it with curtain rods and those cookie press things that look like caulking guns. Sometimes I’d buy high-end Tupperware, whatever. For the most part, I just wandered around with my hands in my pockets. I didn’t want what those people had. Believe me, I did not want their Cuisinarts and table runners. I just liked how weird it felt to watch them.”

“Of all the places to people-watch in New York City, you went straight for the big-box chain. What’d you have against Grand Central? Penn Station?”